Game
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Triton's HDV model format
There was a slight delay in publishing this article as I’d hoped to be able to find the time to delve a little deeper into the format, however this hasn’t been the case so I’ve decided to publish my findings thus far.
I really hope these serve as a good foundation for anyone else looking to take a dive into the demonstration. If you’re perhaps interested in continuing this work, you’ll be able to download the models that I’ve extracted from the demonstration here. Additionally I’ve recently published most of my notes regarding the demonstration, which can be found here.
One of my major goals when digging through the Into the Shadows character demonstration was to figure out a way to pull the models out from the game and then identifying them - this proved to be considerably easier than I anticipated, particularly because of the helpful prompts that Triton’s engine provides when loading the format.
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Iron Storm Packages
I know very little of the Iron Storm game, admittedly, but Saturday evening I decided to take a look at the game and wrote a loader for it’s package format. The package format used in Iron Storm is made up of an LST file, which is basically an index of all the files within the IBF file - the IBF being the actual file that contains the data used by the game.
There isn’t a whole lot to say about either of these but I’ve provided the information below for prosperity; hopefully someone will make something neat out of it!
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A closer look at the Unreal Technology Demo
At the European Computer Trade Show, on September 6th 2000, Epic Games unveiled a technology demonstration of the Unreal Engine, showing new features and capabilities that they were introducing to the engine. A number of new features were shown that Epic Games were looking to introduce to the engine in the short term, along with PlayStation 2 support, but with the long term goal of producing a new engine entirely. This iteration of the engine eventually came to be known as the Warfare engine, now known as Unreal Engine 2, the predecessor to Unreal Engine 3.
The technology demonstration was unsurprisingly comprised of a number of different demonstrations but a lot of these provide some fascinating insight into the development of the engine and the upcoming games at the time. We’ll be going over each of these as they appeared in the video below and doing a short analysis on each.
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Weekly Update
I’ve kind of realised that I’m not doing frequent enough updates. Perhaps it’s time I got into the habit of doing weekly updates just so you know what’s going on and that I’m not totally idle.
So yes, I’ve certainly slowed down with producing videos. It’s not intentional but I’ve kind of lost the motivation a little due to how long the last few videos have taken to produce and the amount of crap I’ve had to deal with when it comes to the Source engine.
Generally I just don’t look forward to launching Hammer, dealing with the crap content pipeline and essentially basically showing things that I’d imagine most of you have already seen; it doesn’t make me feel especially productive. I’m looking to do videos on other things, but I’m afraid I don’t have anything in the pipeline quite at this time.
I’m gradually looking at switching my format to doing more analytical works which is something I’ve always wanted to focus myself towards, primarily in written articles as I can cover more than I could in a video. There are two articles in the works at the moment, one focusing on Unreal Engine 2 and another that covers the last Half-Life 2 video I produced.
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Gears of War development 'previews'
Below is a collection of thumbnails that were generated for Epic Games’ Gears of War, which were packaged with the game, and preview several different levels that were produced during the development of the game.
It should be obvious why these are interesting in a lot of respects, especially as they show a lot of content that didn’t make the final cut. Each of these previews appear to have been generated either for levels that were produced purely for testing mechanics of the game but as well as levels that were used to lay out prefabricated areas.
